The snap was louder than a gunshot.
Then, the world smelled of stale coffee and burning plastic.
Jake opened his eyes. He wasn't in the white void of the Kernel anymore. He wasn't on the tank.
He was sitting in a cheap, ergonomic office chair. The leather was cracked. The wheels squeaked.
"Don't touch the keyboard," a voice said.
Jake spun the chair around.
He was in a room that looked like the inside of a messy server closet. Cables snake-crawled across the floor like black vines. Walls of green monitors pulsed with scrolling data. Empty pizza boxes were stacked in a tower that defied physics.
Sitting at a messy desk, typing furiously on a mechanical keyboard, was Dave.
The Developer.
"Where is my team?" Jake demanded, standing up. His chrome arm hummed, but the Admin light was dim.
"In the lobby," Dave muttered, not looking up. "I put them in the waiting room. They were loud."
"And the coffin?"
"On the desk."
Jake looked. There, sitting between a half-eaten sandwich and a massive monitor, was the glass casket. It had shrunk. It was the size of a shoebox now.
Inside, a tiny, holographic Nadya slept.
"You shrunk her," Jake growled. He reached for the box.
"I compressed her," Dave corrected. "She's a terabyte of emotional data. Heavy file. I needed to free up RAM."
Jake grabbed the box. It felt warm. He held it to his chest.
"Put me back," Jake said. "Put me back in the fight."
Dave stopped typing. He spun his chair around. He looked exhausted. Dark circles under his eyes, grease stains on his grey suit.
"There is no fight, Jake," Dave sighed. "The server is crashing. Look."
He pointed to the wall of monitors.
Jake looked.
Screen 1 showed the Citadel. It was burning. The golden walls were melting into grey sludge.
Screen 2 showed Neo-Moscow. The sky was gone. It was just a black void labeled ERROR 404.
Screen 3 showed Taranov, Valentina, Menzhinsky, and Oppenheimer sitting on a beige couch in a white room, looking confused and holding magazines.
"I tried to patch it," Dave rubbed his temples. "I introduced the 'Stalin' virus—that's you—to stress-test the morality engine. You were supposed to lose, Jake."
"I don't lose," Jake said.
"Clearly," Dave gestured at the chaos on the screens. "You broke the narrative. You stole the 'Hope' asset from the US sector and crashed the economy. Then you punched a hole in the firewall."
"So fix it," Jake said. "You're the god here."
Dave laughed. It was a dry, humorless sound.
"I'm not God, Jake. I'm a Junior Sysadmin. And my shift ended ten minutes ago."
Suddenly, the room turned red. A siren blared—a low, grinding noise that vibrated in Jake's teeth.
WARNING: SYSTEM PURGE IMMINENT.
SOURCE: EXTERNAL HARD SHUTDOWN.
"What is that?" Jake yelled over the siren.
"Corporate," Dave stood up, panicking. He started shoving hard drives into a bag. "They saw the instability. They're pulling the plug. They're wiping the server."
"Wiping?"
"Deletion," Dave looked at Jake. "Total. Permanent. No Recycle Bin. Just zero."
Jake looked at the tiny coffin in his hands.
If the server died, Nadya died. For real this time.
"Stop them," Jake grabbed Dave by the lapels of his cheap suit. "You built this world. Save it."
"I can't!" Dave shoved him back. "I'm locked out! The 'Director' AI—the one I built to manage the NPC routines—he locked me out of the Root Directory! He thinks he's God now!"
Jake froze.
"The Director," Jake said. "The guy with the mustache."
"Hoover. Stalin. Whoever he is today," Dave grabbed his bag. "He sequestered the Core. He's trying to upload himself to the external web before the wipe hits. If he does that, he leaves the simulation to burn."
"He's escaping," Jake realized. "He's taking the lifeboat."
"And he's taking the only exit," Dave said. "The Uplink."
The room shook. A ceiling tile fell, dissolving into pixels before it hit the floor.
"How do I stop him?" Jake asked.
Dave looked at him. He looked at the chrome arm.
"You can't. You're just a virus."
"I'm an Admin," Jake corrected. "You gave me this arm."
"I gave you a debugging tool!" Dave yelled. "It's not a weapon!"
"It is now," Jake slammed his metal fist onto the desk. The desk cracked. "Tell me where the Uplink is."
Dave hesitated. The siren grew louder. The monitors on the wall started to pop, one by one.
"The Moon," Dave whispered.
"The Moon?"
"The Moon isn't a moon," Dave explained fast. "It's the external hard drive. The backup server. The Uplink is in the Tycho Crater. That's where the connection to the real world is."
"We need a rocket," Jake said.
"You don't have time for a rocket!" Dave screamed. "The wipe is happening in ten minutes! The physics engine is already shutting down!"
Jake looked at the screen showing his team. Taranov was trying to eat a plastic plant.
"Send us there," Jake commanded.
"I can't teleport you!" Dave typed frantically. "The spatial coordinates are corrupted!"
"Then cheat," Jake said. "Use the console."
Dave stared at him. Then he looked at the keyboard.
"I can't send you to the Moon," Dave muttered. "But I can spawn the Moon here."
"What?"
"It's going to break everything," Dave grinned, a manic, terrified smile. "But since we're all getting fired anyway..."
Dave hit a key.
ENTER.
The office exploded.
Not with fire. With gravity.
The walls blew outward. The ceiling ripped away.
Jake was suddenly standing in a vacuum.
Sound vanished.
Above him, the sky wasn't black. It was grey static.
And crashing through the static, descending like a falling star, was the Moon.
It was massive. It filled the entire sky. It was crashing directly into the Citadel.
"I brought the mountain to Mohammed!" Dave's voice echoed in Jake's head—a direct audio injection.
Jake looked around. He was back in the White Room. The tank was there. His team was there, looking terrified.
The little coffin in his hand grew, expanding back to full size. Taranov caught it before it hit the ground.
"Boss!" Taranov yelled. "Why is the moon falling on us?"
"It's not falling," Jake shouted, his voice vibrating through the floor. "It's landing! That's our ride!"
The Moon slammed into the horizon.
There was no dust. No crater.
The simulation just accepted the new geometry. The Moon merged with the Earth.
The Citadel was now a bridge connecting Neo-Moscow to the lunar surface.
"The Uplink is at the top of the crater!" Dave's voice crackled. "The Director is already there! If he finishes the upload, the server wipes instantly!"
"We have to climb the Moon," Valentina stared up at the grey, cratered landscape looming over them.
"We drive," Jake ran to the tank.
"The tank is wrecked!" Valentina yelled. "The tracks are gone!"
Jake looked at his admin arm. It was glowing red now. The "New Game+" mode was active.
He looked at the tank.
"Dave!" Jake shouted at the sky. "Give me a loot drop!"
"I'm out of assets!" Dave yelled back. "Use what you have!"
Jake looked at the Object 279. It was a saucer. It looked like a UFO.
"Yuri!" Jake screamed. "Is the gravity engine still online?"
"Father," Yuri's voice returned, clear and sharp. "The gravitational constant of the environment has shifted. We are now in a low-gravity zone."
"Perfect," Jake jumped onto the hull. "Taranov! Strap the coffin down! Valentina! Fire up the reactor!"
"We don't have fuel!"
"We don't need fuel," Jake pointed at the sky, where the blue deletion wave was eating the clouds. "We have fear."
The blue wave was coming fast. It was a wall of nothingness, erasing mountains, cities, and history.
"Go!" Jake slammed his hand on the hull.
He didn't hack the tank. He hacked the weight of the tank.
CMD: SET MASS = 0.
The 60-ton metal beast floated off the ground.
"Whoa!" Menzhinsky grabbed the railing as they drifted up.
"Valentina, use the recoil to steer!" Jake ordered.
BOOM.
The cannon fired. The tank shot forward, surfing the air currents.
They flew out of the White Room, through the shattered ceiling, and into the broken sky.
Below them, Neo-Moscow was dissolving. The buildings turned into wireframes, then into numbers, then into void.
Ahead of them lay the Moon. Grey, cold, and crawling with enemies.
"Hostiles detected!" Yuri warned. "The Director has deployed the Firewall Guard."
On the ridges of the Moon, figures appeared.
They weren't soldiers. They were code-knights. Massive, shining silver giants wielding hammers made of deletion algorithms.
"They're guarding the Uplink," Taranov racked the slide of his pistol. "And we have a tank that floats."
"Oppenheimer," Jake looked at the physicist. "How do we kill a Firewall?"
Oppenheimer adjusted his glasses. He was grinning. A mad, desperate grin.
"You don't kill a firewall," Oppenheimer said, pulling a grenade from his pocket. "You overload it with traffic."
"Traffic?"
"Spam," Jake realized. "We need to spam them."
Jake looked at the deleting world below. Millions of panicked NPCs. Workers. Soldiers.
"Yuri," Jake said. "Open a port. Invite everyone."
"Everyone?"
"Everyone," Jake said. "Tell the people of Moscow that salvation is on the Moon. Tell them to run."
"Broadcasting..."
Below, in the dying city, a million lights turned on.
The mob woke up.
"Let's start a riot," Jake said.
The floating tank sped toward the Moon, leading an army of the damned against the gates of heaven.
TIMER: 09:00 UNTIL WIPE.